The President Proposes . . .

By Kevin Boyle

April 5, 2013

Ira Katznelson heard his first political argument around the family table a few weeks before the presidential election of 1952. His grandmother started it, as only a grandmother can, by announcing that she wasn’t going to vote. Katz­nelson’s parents, who adored Adlai Stevenson, were suitably shocked. But Bubbeh Frima held her ground. “Since Roosevelt,” she insisted, “they are all pygmies.”

It’s easy to see why she thought such a thing. From the day in March 1933 when he first took the oath of office until his death in April 1945, Franklin Roosevelt dominated public life in a way no other modern president has matched. There’s the litany of policies he put into place — financial regulation, farm subsidies, public works, mortgage protection, union rights, Social Security, the minimum wage — that reshaped Americans’ relationship to their government. There’s the war he directed, which unleashed the nation’s power and remade the place of the United States in the world.

Most of all there’s the message Roose­velt delivered. So deep were the crises of the 1930s and 1940s that many observers wondered whether democracies were too weak to handle them. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Benito Mussolini proclaimed in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” It took 12 years of innovation and almost four of total war. But in the end Roosevelt proved how wrong the skeptics had been. “At a time when despair and alienation were prostrating other peoples under the heel of dictatorship, that was no small accomplishment,” David M. Kennedy says in “Freedom From Fear,” his Pulitzer Prize-­winning history of the Roosevelt years.

Katznelson, Columbia’s Ruggles professor of political science and history, makes precisely the same point in the first few pages of “Fear Itself.” Then he gives it a twist. Roosevelt’s defense of democracy, he argues, rested in large part on his willingness to work with political forces that had no commitment to democratic ideals. Sometimes the connections were relatively benign, like the New Deal’s brief flirtation with quasi-fascist economic planning in 1933. Sometimes they were the lesser of two evils. Only by allying with Joseph Stalin, for instance, could Roosevelt assure victory over Nazi Germany. And only if he had turned on his ally and extended the war beyond Hitler’s defeat could he have stopped the Soviets’ occupation of Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945. One connection, though, Katznelson considers utterly Faust­ian: to push their legislative programs through Congress, the New Dealers sold their souls to the segregated South.

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Franklin D. Roosevelt, circa 1937.CreditAssociated Press

The calculation was simple enough. Thanks to the disfranchisement of blacks and the reign of terror that accompanied it, the South had become solidly Democratic by the beginning of the 20th century, the Deep South exclusively so. One-party rule translated into outsize power on Capitol Hill: when Roosevelt took office, Southerners held almost half the Democrats’ Congressional seats and many of the key committee chairmanships. So whatever Roosevelt wanted to put into law had to have Southern approval. And he wouldn’t get it if he dared to challenge the region’s racial order.

Katznelson spends much of “Fear Itself” detailing the dismal results. During his first six years in office — the New Deal’s “radical moment,” Katznelson calls it — Roosevelt repeatedly let the Southern bloc write discriminatory provisions into his programs. When the Tennessee Valley Authority built model communities, Southern congressmen made sure they were strictly segregated. Southerners on the Senate Finance Committee cut farm laborers and domestic servants out of the Social Security Act because it simply wouldn’t do to have white families paying taxes on their black maids. They did the same thing to the administration’s minimum wage bills. The bloc’s power imposed other costs as well. Twice civil rights activists tried to make lynching a federal offense. Twice Southern Democrats blocked them, the second time by filibuster. Each time Roosevelt refused to intervene, though even a small signal of support might have kept the bill alive.

Late in the decade the dynamic shifted. Southern Democrats became Roosevelt’s most reliable allies in his fight against isolationism. And once the nation went to war they gave the president their vigorous support. On the home front, though, they began to defy him. Out went Roosevelt’s proposal to pack the Supreme Court, defeated by the Southerners’ sudden willingness to align themselves with their Republican colleagues. Out went the administration’s economic planning programs. Out went its attempt to create a national employment policy. Most important, out went the federal government’s unstinting support for the labor movement, which in the late 1930s and early 1940s had become a powerful advocate for racial change.

Roosevelt didn’t live to see the full force of the Southerners’ campaign. But by the time Harry Truman left office in 1953, Katznelson says, the New Deal had been tamed, its broad vision replaced by endless rounds of interest group politics, its foreign policy driven by a national security state more interested in grand crusades — and enormous military spending — than in democratic processes. And in the South, Jim Crow, described by the moral philosopher Avishai Margalit as “a regime of cruelty and humiliation,” still stood.

It’s a powerful argument, swept along by Katznelson’s robust prose and the imposing scholarship that lies behind it. Only at the very end of the book, though, does he acknowledge another side of the story. For all its compromises, the New Deal gave millions of Americans a sense of belonging — a sense of rights — they’d never had before. That sense swept through the industrial working class, where union buttons suddenly became badges of honor. It swept through all those ethnic communities that until the 1930s had been treated as not quite American. And despite the racial dynamics Katznelson so ably describes, it swept through African-­American communities too.

No doubt that’s why Bubbeh Frima saw Roosevelt as such a towering figure, because where she lived up in Washington Heights, America seemed a better place than it had been before he took office. That’s also why, just a few years after Roosevelt’s death, Jim Crow began to come tumbling down, shattered by a social movement that had been invigorated by the promise, if not necessarily the practice, of the New Deal era. Roosevelt can’t be given credit for that extraordinary triumph, of course; that belongs to the men, women and children who risked their lives on the streets of the South. But he played a role, however indirect. And any assessment of his legacy has to set that fact alongside the concessions that marred his administration and blighted our less than perfect union.

FEAR ITSELF

The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

By Ira Katznelson

Illustrated. 706 pp. Liveright Publishing. $29.95.

Kevin Boyle teaches American history at Ohio State University. He is the author of “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age.”